Daniel Ellsberg says Obama should be impeached over NDAA

These days, political historians are about the only ones who know who Daniel Ellsberg is. That’s because his heyday, so to speak, took place more than 40 years ago.

For those who are not familiar with Ellsberg, he became famous during the nation’s most tumultuous time in recent memory: The waning days of the Vietnam war, in the early 1970s, when the nation was tearing itself apart socially, culturally and politically.

Ellsberg, you see, was once the country’s most famous whistleblower. The information he leaked did more to sour a generation on the federal government than even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who brought down President Richard Nixon by exposing the Watergate scandal beginning in 1972.

What did Ellsberg do? He leaked the Pentagon Papers, a collection of documents that revealed secret information regarding U.S. involvement in Vietnam decades before American troops were sent to die there. Officially known as “United States-Vietnam Relations: 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense,” the papers served as the first in a series of revelations that disillusioned tens of millions of voters for decades. At the time, Vietnam was being blamed – or scapegoated – for most of what many Americans thought ailed the country, so to find out their government had been involved in the Southeast Asian nation for decades before the war began was devastating.